Net54baseball.com Forums - Happy Birthday Willie Mays!

In honor of the oldest living Hall of Famer, Willie Mays, who turns 91 93 on May 6th, below are some anecdotes about his life, most of which were lifted from SABR’s article on him: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/willie-mays/
I don’t expect anyone to read all of it, and many of you probably already know most of it, but it was fun to learn/write.

1) Baseball is in Willie’s DNA. Willie’s paternal grandfather, a sharecropper, was a pitcher. Willie’s Dad, William Howard Mays (named after William Howard Taft) or “Cat” as he was known, played semi-pro ball, and taught his son the finer points of baseball. And when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, he told his son to start preparing for the majors. “When he said I had a chance, I believed him,” Mays says. “He made it possible to believe.”
When his Dad caught Willie smoking and drinking, he sat him down with a jar of moonshine and a cheap cigar and made him finish both. Willie said he was sick for weeks afterwards, and avoided both vices the rest of his life, save for champagne after the World Series.

2) Willie starred at quarterback and basketball for Fairfield Industrial High School, where he trained to be a cleaner/presser for laundry. Though his High School did not have a baseball team, he played second base and center field alongside his father on the Fairfield Industrial League team and the semipro Gray Sox. Later, after a brief stint with the Negro Minor League Chattanooga Choo-Choos, Willie was called up in 1948 to join the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League where he was coached by Piper Davis, a former teammate of his father’s. Cat Mays, Piper Davis, and Willie’s High School principal insisted that the 17 year old Mays should graduate from high school, so he only played in the Black Barons’ weekend home games until the school year was over. He was by far the youngest player on the defending champions of the Negro American League, and played in the final Negro League World Series, where the Barons lost to the Homestead Grays. In Game 3 of the Series, he showed glimpses of his future when he made two sparkling defensive plays, chasing down a Bob Thurman fly in the fourth and gunning down Buck Leonard trying to go from first to third in the sixth. He also scorched a single through the box in the ninth, driving in the winning run and handing the Barons their only win in the Series.

3) After the 1949 season Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella led a barnstorming team in the South. In a game between the barnstormers and the Black Barons, Mays threw Larry Doby out at the plate after catching a fly ball near the center-field fence. This impressed Campy, and he begged the Dodgers to send scouts down to sign Willie. The scouting report filed by Brooklyn’s scout echoed something Buck Leonard had said the previous year: “The kid can’t hit the curveball.” But Willie left a better impression on other scouts. The Giants’ scout Eddie Montague, who was sent to Birmingham to scout the Barons’ first baseman wrote that Willie “was the greatest young player I had ever seen in my life or my scouting career” and that they “got a kid playing center field practically barefooted that’s the best ballplayer I ever looked at. You better send somebody down there with a barrelful of money and grab this kid.” Willie wrote in his autobiography, Say Hey: “Montague was in our little house in Fairfield, and I signed my first professional contract. Since I was a minor, my father signed too. … I got a $4,000 signing bonus and a salary of $250 a month.

4) The Giants were 17-19 when Willie joined them. Coach Leo Durocher immediately installed the 20-year-old in center field. The Giants won all three of the games in Philadelphia, though Mays was hitless in his first 12 at-bats. Despite his batting woes, Willie batted third against the Boston Braves and their star southpaw Warren Spahn in his first home game. In his first at-bat, he hit Spahn’s offering atop the left-field roof for a home run, his first major-league hit. After the homer, Mays went on a 0-for-13 slide, leaving him hitting .038 (1-for-26). At this point, in an often-told story, Willie sat in front of his locker, crying. Coaches Freddie Fitzsimmons and Herman Franks sent for Durocher. When Mays said he couldn’t hit big-league pitching, Durocher replied, “As long as I’m the manager of the Giants, you are my center fielder. … You are the best center fielder I’ve ever looked at.” Then he told Mays to hitch up his pants more to give himself a more favorable strike zone. Willie then went on a 14-for-33 tear. The Giants would end the season with a miraculous 37-7 stretch to catch the Dodgers, and Bobby Thomson’s famous home run to win the best-of-three playoff. Willie was kneeling in the on-deck circle when Thomson hit his homer in the bottom of the ninth in Game Three, and by his own admission, was still frozen there as Thomson rounded second. The 20-year-old was on his way to the World Series. Unfortunately, the highlight of the World Series for Willie, who batted .182, was meeting his idol Joe DiMaggio during warm-ups as the Giants readied to face the Yankees, who won in six games.

5) Monte Irvin roomed with Willie Mays on the road and mentored him when he joined the New York Giants. Willie said: “When I came up in '51, Monte taught me a lot of things about life in the big city — well, I call it the Big Apple, New York….So Monte was there playing alongside of me at all times, and it was just a wonderful feeling to have someone in the outfield with me to make sure I didn't make a lot of mistakes out there." Monte Irvin, Willie Mays and Hank Thompson would go on to form the first all-black outfield.

6) Before home games, Willie played stickball with the neighborhood kids in Harlem where he lived in an apartment, treating them to ice cream afterward. Then he would walk to work at the Polo Grounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCIB3zT97QA

7) When the 1951 season was over, Mays was drafted to serve in the Korean War. Never sent to Korea, his primary job was to entertain the troops by playing baseball for the Fort Eustis, Virginia team alongside some other Major Leaguers. It was at Fort Eustis that Mays perfected the basket catch. Mays missed about 266 games because of his military service. The Giants were 70-84-1 without Mays on the team in 1953, 35 games behind the Dodgers. With Mays back on the team in 1954, the Giants finished 97-57, beating the Dodgers by 5 games for the NL Pennant. Before the 1954 season, Durocher predicted a .300, 30-home-run season for Mays, and Willie reached the second of those milestones by midseason, playing the first half of the season on a home-run tear. Batting .326 and ahead of Ruth’s 60-homer pace when he hit his 36th on July 28, Durocher asked him to stop trying for the fences and go for base hits for the good of the team. Willie hit only five more homers the rest of the year but batted .379 down the stretch. Going into the final day of the season, teammate Don Mueller was hitting a league-leading .3426, the Dodgers’ Duke Snider .3425, and Willie .3422. Mays finished 3-for-4, Mueller 2-for-6, and Snider 0-for-3. After the games, Mays was batting .345, Mueller .342, and Snider .341.

8) The Giants would go on to sweep the ’54 World Series which included May’s famous catch of Vic Wertz’s fly ball to centerfield. But it wasn’t “The Catch” that Mays felt was his best. In a 1996 interview Willie remembered: “I made a catch in Ebbets Field, off of a guy by the name of Bobby Morgan. And it was in the seventh inning, two men on, [two out,] a ball was hit over the shortstop — over the line — over the shortstop. Now you’ve got to visualize this. Over the shortstop. I go and catch the ball in the air. I’m in the air like this, parallel. I catch the ball, I hit the fence. Ebbets Field was so short that if you run anywhere you’re going to hit a fence. So I catch the fence, knock myself out. And the first guy that I saw — there were two guys — when I open my eyes, was Leo and Jackie. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Why is Jackie out here?’ Jackie came to see if I caught the ball, and Leo came to see about me. So I’m saying to myself, ‘This guy is thinking very cool.’ I’m talking about Jackie now. He wasn’t even on the field, he was in the dugout. Now this is my thinking, he may have a different reason. That was my best catch, I think. It was off of Bobby Morgan in Ebbets Field. I caught a lot of balls barehanded, which I felt was good, but that was my best catch, I think.”

9) Between the 1954 and 1955 seasons, Willie played in the Puerto Rican League for the Santurce Crabbers, managed by Giants coach Herman Franks. He was in the same outfield as the young and relatively unknown Roberto Clemente. Mays batted a league-leading .393 for the Crabbers, who won the Caribbean Series for Puerto Rico that year.

10) Mays liked to get the crowds excited. One day while running the bases, his cap flew off. After he saw how much the crowd loved it, he always wore a cap that was too small. It perched, rather than fit on his head, and as he ran, the cap went airborne.

11) After the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, the new city did not greet Mays with open arms. After Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was warmly received there, Frank Conniff of the Hearst newspapers commented, “San Francisco is the damnedest city I ever saw in my life. They cheer Khrushchev and boo Mays.” Mays recalled that a real-estate broker withdrew his offer on a home because of pressure from other homeowners in the neighborhood. Mayor George Christopher apologized and offered to share his home with Willie and his wife. In mid-November, they moved into the original house; almost immediately someone threw a brick through a window. Much has been made of the city’s less-than-warm reception. Charles Einstein suggested three factors: a) Mays was the hated embodiment of New York; b) He had the temerity to play center field in Seals Stadium, where the native-born DiMaggio had played it in his minor-league days; He was black. The brick that crashed through his window almost as soon as he moved in had to reflect at least one of these viewpoints, if not all three.

12) Toward the end of his career, an old friend went out of her way to bring Mays home. Joan Whitney Payson had been a minority owner in the New York Giants, who was opposed to the move out west. By 1972, she was a majority owner in the Mets and thought it was important Mays finish his career in New York. “She said, ‘Write your own contract,’” Mays remembers. “I write, ‘I, Willie Mays, will do what I want when I want.’ No way was anyone going to sign that. She said, ‘That’s what you want?’ She signed it.”

13) Mays was banned from baseball in 1973 by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn after he took a job with an Atlantic City casino as a goodwill ambassador soon after retiring from baseball. When Peter Ueberroth took over as commissioner in 1985, he rescinded the ban and apologized to Mays and Mickey Mantle, who had also been banned by Kuhn for a similar casino gig.

14) Willie played with Bobby Bonds in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bobby’s young son Barry would hang around the clubhouse and play catch with Willie before games. Mays became Barry Bonds’ Godfather, and has supported Barry through his steroid accusations and has never said anything negative about him.

And since every thread needs a card, here are my favorites of Willie Mays: